IT Management Challenges and Solutions

We have several challenges in IT, among them is to have a solution for traditional IT, where the concern is to keep the day to day functioning, infrastructure, availability and quality of services, on the other hand, we are able to provide agile responses to new challenges to technology that it is increasingly improved and developed continuously.

It is the union of stability and operational efficiency with the strategic planning of technologies for the evolution of the organization.

New scenarios arise every day, and with them, the adaptation not only of IT but of the organization as a whole.

A clear example of this is the pandemic that the world is going through, new resources, technologies, and thoughts have been created or adapted to this reality.

IT management must always look to the future without ever losing focus on the current.

Adaptations and adjustments are necessary daily, either for business needs or for external reasons. Here are some examples:

Corporate mobility

Companies have adapted to an often-new reality, have left the traditional model “behind the tables” and reinvented themselves in the remote work mode.

A huge paradigm breaks for more hard-pressed corporations, where the IT challenge was to guarantee the productivity of employees while maintaining at least the safety standards used internally in companies.

Choosing between CAPEX and OPEX

What is the best scenario for OPEX investments? Wouldn’t the use of CAPEX be more guaranteed?

The challenge is precisely to balance the use of the investment.

The lack of specialized labor and the ease of hiring an outsourced service are advantages of CAPEX investment, however, the guarantee of the use, growth, and development of the professional along the lines of the company is an attraction of OPEX.

Balance between proactivity and reactivity

Seeking a balance between proactivity and reactivity is one of the great challenges for the IT manager. It is necessary to deal with activities so that they can be balanced so that the expected results are achieved.

Proactivity is a quality that many companies look for in the personality of their employees, as it is a characteristic of people who act in advance, avoiding future problems. It is the opposite of reactivity, which seeks a solution after the problem is realized.

The importance of knowing how to measure these two characteristics is in the problems that an exaggerated focus on any one of them can bring.

Assuming that the IT manager works only with the proactiveness of his employees, consequently, all incidents are treated with the same degree of priority, generating an excessive burden on the sector and a lack of progress within the business.

On the other hand, the focus on reactivity can generate more negative effects, leading to slowness in solving problems, which generates large losses, especially in the case of significant errors for your business.

Investments in Information Security

The investment in information security is another barrier that the manager needs to overcome, where the market evaluation, research of numbers, and mainly the gains for the business must be considered when presenting a proposal to the company.

Unfortunately, many companies only realize the importance of this when they face cyber-attacks and fraud, lose key documents and files for their business, and, at the extreme, have financial and reputation losses.

When setting up an investment plan, the following items should preferably be addressed: reducing vulnerabilities, preventing financial and image damage, increasing competitiveness (customers are more comfortable signing contracts with companies that maintain information security in their than its competitor) and, favor the continuous improvement of organizational maturity.

The challenges of the IT manager are bigger and more complex every day, for that, we must always keep in mind that all actions to be taken or implemented must be part of the business strategy and not a specific IT project.

A fundamental point for success is always to be aligned with the company’s top management, explaining not only the costs for investing in people, processes, or technology but also, how valuable they return to the business and the company’s growth will be.

By Carlos Travagini
Chief Information Security Officer
Belo Horizonte, Brazil